


mercury falling

by orphan_account



Category: Morning Glories
Genre: Angst, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-30
Updated: 2013-10-30
Packaged: 2017-12-30 22:47:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 854
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1024300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fortunato is not supposed to miss her the way that he does.</p>
            </blockquote>





	mercury falling

**Author's Note:**

> I told Macey I’d write her something Irina/Fortunato as a thank-you for linking me to her MG reaction images folder while on mobile so here. Inspired by [this fine tune](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ds5EuvdTYUQ).

There’s a part of Fortunato, a very small part, one that shivers and curls in on itself and keeps its head down, that looks out at the winter-darkened skeletons of the woods around the Academy and searches for footprints in the crusting, glittering snow and wonders when Irina will come back. 

"Of course she won’t," Vanessa murmurs, a tattered red scarf that had once been Brendan’s wrapped around her thinning neck, her hair cropped close to her face. 

"She always does," Guillaume assures him impartially, hauling his dull axe over his shoulder to chop another log, his breath streaming out of him in clouds. 

Ian doesn’t say anything. Then again, this is not a new development – Fortunato had been admittedly surprised, but perhaps not as much as he’d thought at the time, at how quickly Ian had fallen silent when Akiko’s pulse had gone still beneath his skinny fingertips. 

Fortunato doesn’t know who to believe. It’s far too cold for pondering, and far too desolate in the forest for hoping. After Irina had splattered the spring fields with the scarlet blood of the son of Abraham, after the savage and damaged howls of the girl with the hair like the flames of Hell had gone quiet in the early morning air, after all of it, the pieces and the pain, had crumbled at last into ash, Irina had told all of them to run to the woods, to hide from even the slightest breath that came out of the Academy, because even though there was no going home now, no returning to the desert sands that had molded them into soldiers with failing compasses, they at least owed it to themselves to triumph. 

"There is triumph in retreat, sometimes," she had murmured to him once, as the others had slept (Ian muttering heartbroken little things to himself under an oak tree, Guillaume silent and unfailing against a log, Vanessa in the fetal position with a blanket over her), as the meager fire spluttered in front of them. "Do not tell them I said this. They will think I am a coward."

She always looked so small with his coat draped around her shoulders – and it was so strange to him to see Irina looking small, looking sleepy, looking sorrowful, but these things grew in her pale eyes as their brothers and sisters spent less and less of their attention on her now softening words. 

Not knowing what to say, only that he could not contradict her, only that he wished to sit closer to her and whisper, “ _Você é linda. Você é poderoso_ ,” he had reached his hand across the dirt and rested it atop hers, and it had been worth the astonished and wary look on her battle-hewn face, and had been worth the way her fingernails had grazed his thumb when she had curled her fingers into a fist and drawn away after just a beat too long. 

She had gone out to hunt one morning and she had not come back. It is winter and Fortunato hears the wild wolves in all their wanderlust baying in the trees, and he hopes that their feral and forsaken cries will speak to Irina’s kindred spirit and guide her home. 

Even when the others leave him, even when Ian purposefully doesn’t pull a blanket over himself in the night and his heartbeat stops in the dark from the cold, even when Vanessa and Guillaume and Fortunato himself work with their numb and blistered hands to dig a grave in a land where the ground is harder than stone, Fortunato knows he will wait. He does not know why this is so – he does not know why seeing the flames spray heat and color onto Irina’s pale cheeks ignites something in him so, only that it does, and only that each night he will pray for her, for her sinewy form to find its way back to him, and for himself to forever have the will not to touch her face too gently, or to let his fingers graze the softest spot on her elbow, or to want to watch her for a few moments when she dozes, just so that he can memorize the look on her face: vulnerable and free, like the face of someone greeting God Himself. 

Fortunato’s hands shake when he tries to build a fire. His heart shakes when the moon rises over the tents and the stones and the charred-up kindling – his coat still smells like her, like gunsmoke and olives. If all of the planets and stars above fall down and crush him, he will not mind – he is sure that Irina is setting the brightest one in the sky ablaze, and that her hand will find him, and tap him awake, her whole form clad in a nightgown as pure and white as the snow that wraps his fingers in paralysis. 

_From whose womb has come the ice? And the frost of heaven, who has given it birth?_

He is sure that when Irina comes back – and yes, it is a when – she will freeze him, too. 

**Author's Note:**

> THIS IS OLD, BUT I'M PUTTING IT HERE FOR POSTERITY.


End file.
